The communication of love is an important aspect of interpersonal relationships
across cultures. But saying “I love you” can be very delicate walk, with much gray area,
regarding what can and should be communicated about love, when, by whom and to
whom. Love is sometimes felt but not expressed, other times, love is expressed only
nonverbally; and still other times, it is communicated verbally, with or without nonverbal
manifestations.
In English and Vietnamese, the way people choose toexpress love is not the same as
it is affected by cultural values. Love declarations include in themselves people’s
viewpoints which are presented quite differently inthe two languages. Hence, what needs
to be carried out in this study will be an investigation of cultural meaning of love
declarations in folklores of the two languages in order to find out the similarities and
differences between them. The thesis also attempts to explain what are behind the
differences uncovered in the investigation.
Our thesis is entitled “An investigation into the cultural meaning of love declarations
in English and Vietnamese folklores”. The choice of the thesis is generated from two
reasons: Firstly, as Swales (1990: 34) stated that “the concept of genre has maintained a
central position in folklore studies ever since thepioneering work in the early nineteenth
century”. The functionalist in folklore would rather stress socio-cultural value. For
Malinowski (1960, cited in Swales 1990:35) “folklore genres contribute to the maintenance
and survival of social groups because they serve social and spiritual needs”. Perhaps
inevitably, to assign cultural value also requires the investigator to pay attention to how a
community views and itself classify genre. This idea will lead to the fact that love
declaration is a mode of social communication and is only a genre among others, therefore,
we would like to investigate love declaration in English and Vietnamese folklores to see
the similarities and differences of this genre in the two languages. Secondly, love
declarations, as mentioned above, reflect human’s ideology, so we wish to see how the
ideologies represented in the two languages.